The ascendancy of malleable Islamist forces also has its uses for the US’s containment strategy towards China (and Russia). Islamists lend themselves as a foreign policy instrument. The rise of Islamism in Afghanistan cannot but radicalize hot spots such as the North Caucasus, Kashmir and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China.
M.K.Bhadrakumar
13th February, 2010
The Nobel Peace Prize has a tradition. In the entire period from 1901 to 2009, it has never been awarded twice to any of its 97 individual recipients.
United States President Barack Obama is thus unlikely to win a second Nobel. Yet, in an historical perspective, Afghanistan promises to become the first country in which Islamists will have been ushered into power on the wave of America’s newfound smart power.
That too may only be the beginning. “Of course Afghanistan is not an island. There is no solution just within its borders,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a security conference in Munich last weekend.
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